Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

The unexpected nature of natural disasters and other disruptive events means that preparation is key to managing disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Join the business continuity and disaster recovery community for live and recorded presentations discussing best practices for business continuity planning, disaster recovery programs and business continuity management. Learn from BCDR experts to develop your critical infrastructure and gain insight into tactical solutions to your BCDR issues.

The risks and opportunities which digital technologies, devices and media bring us are manifest. Cyber risk is never a matter purely for the IT team, although they clearly play a vital role. An organisation's risk management function need a thorough understanding of the constantly evolving risks as well as the practical tools and techniques available to address them

As a business, concerns over RTO, RPO, costs, security, and data privacy have historically made the decision for cloud backup a complicated one. However, cloud technologies continue to evolve, and can now provide substantial cost benefits while overcoming the most stringent security, data privacy, storage and performance hurdles. This makes it a perfect fit for many backup needs — especially remote office server backup.

In this session we’ll cover:

* The state of the cloud and the latest advancements for D2C server backup
* How security and data storage advancements are addressing key enterprise data privacy concerns
* How to leverage the cloud for remote office server backup and archiving, while significantly lowering storage and administration expenses

Achieving cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) services without a physical DR site — or having to extend your DR footprint — is possible. In this live webcast with Microsoft, see how you can use AppAssure software in combination with Microsoft® Azure® and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) from Dell partner, eFolder.

The first half of the webcast will showcase how you can store AppAssure backup archives directly on Azure and perform item-level recovery from the archive without having to download the archive from the cloud. Then we’ll showcase ways to replicate AppAssure backup images to the eFolder® Storage Cloud® and enable multiple disaster recovery options.

Join our webcast partnered with Microsoft® and see how easy it is to:
• Manage the growth of your backup archives
• Establish cost-effective disaster recovery without a DR site
• Avoid extending your DR footprint

What you will learn:
• How to leverage Azure to directly store AppAssure backup archives
• How to perform item-level recovery from the archive without downloading the archive from the cloud
• How to replicate AppAssure backup images to the eFolder Storage Cloud
• How to enable multiple disaster recovery options, including image download, overnight drive shipment or recovery in the eFolder® Continuity Cloud®

Do you still rely on disk backups in your data center, with additional facilities on tape? Take controle of your datacenter! Experience the magic of carefree cloud backup & DR in this video tutorial. www.vspex.proact.nl

The BCI's annual Horizon Scan report, in partnership with BSI, was published in February 2015 and the BCI and BSI are hosting a webinar to highlight some of the results. Historically the Horizon Scan has shown that unplanned IT and telecoms outage is the greatest threat to BC practitioners, but will this remain the case? All will be revealed!
In this webinar, the report's author - Patrick Alcantara - will discuss the findings in greater depth along with BSI's Lorraine Orr.

Join Roni Putra and Robert Bassett -masterminds behind the origins of storage virtualization- and hear their personal opinions on Virtual SAN, where storage technology is today and the future of data storage in general. This is an incredibly candid session about the ever changing storage landscape by two people responsible in large part for the changes now happening.

Your organization's Salesforce data is one of its most important resources. Are you doing what you can to keep it safe?

While Salesforce is unlikely to lose data on its own, nearly 75% of all data lost in the cloud is attributed to humans - most of those instances being user error. In this BrightTALK exclusive webinar for Salesforce Administrators, you'll learn the best ways to backup and restore your organization's most important data.

Snapshots have been a key feature of primary storage infrastructures that IT professionals have relied on for years. But storage systems have traditionally been able to support only a limited number of active snapshots. And snapshots, being pointers and not actual data, are also susceptible to a primary storage system failure. As a result, most IT professionals use snapshots sparingly for protecting data. In this webinar Storage Switzerland and Nexenta show you how primary storage can be architected so that snapshots are able to meet almost all of the data protection requirements an organization has.

* On this webcast we're giving away a pass ($2,490 value) to our partner event: The 3rd Annual Stress Testing USA Congress being held in NYC on March 18-19, 2015. All attendees will be included in the draw.

The clock is ticking for enterprises that have not yet upgraded their payment card processing systems to be compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) 3.0. Since Jan. 1, 2015 , there is increasing urgency to not only understand the most important changes in PCI DSS 3.0, but also to be ready for a rigorous QSA assessment against those changes. Since PCI 3.0 is bigger, harder and more expensive than the previous iteration, merchants have their work cut out for them.

PCI DSS founding member, Visa Inc. recently changed its policy on compliance assessments for the PCI DSS. More specifically, Visa decided that merchants who meet a stringent set of criteria including processing 75% of transactions using "Chip and PIN" enabled terminals, may be able to apply for an exemption from PCI DSS assessment requirements. Unfortunately, not all merchants are aware of the change, and fewer understand what it means.

In this special presentation, our expert panel will explain the changes and their implications, and offer a detailed review of PCI DSS 3.0 to help enterprises prepare for assessments and make PCI compliance a whole lot easier.

As your virtual estate grows and you add critical applications to the environment, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to vm protection is no longer an option. Core applications need to be treated differently to tier 2 or 3 systems, and simple manual tasks in a modest environment become impossible to manage in a growing virtual estate. Automation is also a key component if you are planning to move to a private cloud model.

This session will show you how to:
· Meet Protection/Recovery SLA’s with Automation

High profile data security breaches are occurring more frequently than ever before. Sensitive and confidential data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), proprietary business information, and intellectual property are being leaked beyond secure company perimeters. Many assume data breaches are caused by outside sources, but more often than not, breaches originate internally from careless data management and user activities, which in turn, can lead to compliance violations and expensive penalties.

Do you know what’s in your data and where you are most at risk?

Join Perry Dickau, DataGravity Director of Product Management and Will Urban, Technical Marketing Manager for an important discussion on data governance, where you’ll learn:

Learn how arcserve the Unified Data Protection portfolio delivers comprehensive Assured Recovery™ for virtual and physical environments with a next generation unified architecture and unmatched ease of use.

This feature-rich solution allows users to seamlessly scale their data protection needs, and allows them to achieve their recovery point and recovery time objectives. Overly complex traditional backup policies are replaced by modern, task-based data protection plans. Deep integration with industry-leading hypervisors enables the automation of complex, repetitive tasks.

The Arcserve UDP portfolio also includes the UDP7000 Series appliance offering. This unique set and forget solution provides all the power of UDP in an appliance form factor, and is easy to deploy and manage.

The Arcserve Unified Data Protection portfolio eliminates the need to have multiple data protection vendors.
It supports heterogeneous environments including:
•Physical and Virtual Platforms
•Platform or application or database type
•On-Premise to Off-Premise (DR site or in the cloud)

Come join this informative session to learn how to achieve all of this in a simple, unified management console!

Today’s modern storage solutions follow the old fashioned rule of three. Dominated by three words: Software-Defined Storage.

Learn about the trifecta of benefits from efficiency to flexibility to financial responsibility by joining Rolf Versluis, CTO at Adcap, a leading reseller in the SouthEast and Michael Letschin, Director of Products at Nexenta as they discuss the trends and use cases for Software-Defined storage and their play with the major virtualization vendors.

Attend to learn more about:
- What is the rule of three?
- Defining the world of SDx - software only, hyper-converged or traditional
- What are the business advantages of SDS
- How SDS can be integrated in your virtual environment
- Deployment options
- Examples of SDS deployment architectures

Today’s IT environment has seen an accelerated pace of change and complexity—all increasing demands on IT. Tens, hundreds and even thousands of changes per day should not be done manually.

Join us for a discussion of effective solutions for automating changes in the network, modifying security controls, resolving routing dilemmas and compliance rule conflicts. This session will provide insights gained through years of experience in the network security arena, and share with you how network changes can done securely, accurately and quickly.

Virtualization has enabled consolidation of hardware, greater application efficiency and availability, and scalability. It is the foundation for private cloud and the bridge to public cloud, which establishes the hybrid cloud ecosystem. As companies deploy, update, and maintain their virtualized applications across multiple platforms, they will need a single point of truth to optimize cost savings and operational efficiencies.

Virtualization management needs to be the single point of truth for IT managers. The truth starts with visibility via monitoring, pivots into business continuity and optimization with troubleshooting, and provides reporting capabilities for baselines, efficacies, and data-driven decisions.

From unobtrusive advanced malware detection technologies to automated threat response and actionable mobile-friendly dashboard – manage security from any device, any time, ESET will present new solutions for securing your endpoints and new ways to manage them.

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement has been a huge boon for businesses that put a premium on productivity. File sync and share solutions have emerged to help employees work from anywhere, at any time, on any device. In this BrightTALK exclusive, eFolder explores the top seven features that business should consider when adopting a file sync and share solution. Learn what is required for a file sync and share solution to improve collaboration, maximize productivity, and ensure security.

We know big data is growing and represents a huge opportunity to mine competitive business value. Some even propose landing all corporate data first in a big data lake to make it available for multiple downstream uses. And soon, all your data could be thought of as big data. But what happens with enterprise storage? How do we protect that big data and apply corporate storage governance? How do support storage workflows on the backend? In this panel, we'll discuss some of the hottest trends and newest solutions for storing, protecting, and leveraging big data in the corporate IT data center.

Technology gurus have inundated IT organizations with new acronyms, abbreviations, buzzwords, and catch phrases in an attempt to capture mindshare and stay current with industry evolution. Most recently, it's all about cloud, convergence, and software-defined storage (SDS). But what does it all really mean, and why should enterprise organizations care?

Storage architectures have continued to evolve, thanks in part to the maturity seen in cloud and other technologies in the SDS space. SDS solutions, for example, allow IT entities to create a solution with somewhat commodity hardware to address nearly uncontrollable data growth. The challenges for enterprise organizations, across most verticals, is scaling storage to accommodate this rapid growth and address retention needs, while at the same time addressing performance bottlenecks, power utilization, data center space constraints, and, most critically, data availability and accessibility. Of course, cost is a big factor as well with today’s dwindling IT budgets.

How can enterprises know what is right for their environments? What differentiates a converged infrastructure from a hyper-converged infrastructure?

Join Seagate Chief Technology Evangelist David A. Chapa and Director, Global Alliance Partners Michael K. Connolly for a live webinar that will help you cut through the hype and learn more about:

- Seagate's perspective on the market indicators
- Top peer challenges, according to leading industry research
- The difference between converged and hyper-converged infrastructures
- Best and worst use case for SDS

The top concern for IT planners looking to implement or expand the use of their VDI investment is storage performance. This is because every step that is taken to drive down cost per desktop, or improve the user experience, impacts storage performance and capacity. All-flash arrays address the performance problem with a sledgehammer and for many environments they can be the most cost effective option. But for others, hybrid solutions may make more sense.

Join Storage Switzerland and Tegile Systems for a live, interactive webinar as we discuss the various challenges that VDI scale brings to storage and how All-Flash Arrays and Hybrid Arrays can address those challenges.

Many Hadoop deployments comprise a mix of versions and distributions of Hadoop running in different clusters, and often include specialized storage and file systems. AltoStor extends the concept of a Hadoop Compatible File System (HCFS) to span these diverse environments, using active-active replication to unify portions of the Hadoop namespace between clusters. In this webinar, Jagane Sundar, WANdisco's CTO and formerly a Hadoop architect at Yahoo, will discuss this new product and its practical applications.

The rise of malware and malicious insiders brings application security into clear focus. Well written software, security testing and code obfuscation mitigate risk but the most critical applications in the most risky locations need to go one step further to become tamper resistant. Trusted applications that handle sensitive data, control valuable IP and perform critical processes can be isolated and protected within secure execution environments. Mobile phones, embedded devices and data center servers all adopt physical hardening to secure the applications they host. This webinar focuses on protecting business applications that support high-tech manufacturing, content distribution, online authentication – in fact any situation where you need to know for sure that your application is doing precisely what the developer intended – nothing more, nothing less.

- I purchased my trainers from a sports consultant (I have a BCM plan from a consultant – now what?)
- My trainers have gathered dust (My BCP is covered in dust and coffee stains)
- Dusting off the trainers and setting goals (Is my plan fit for purpose and what outcome am I wanting to achieve from the exercise?)
- It’s a long road, with hills and valleys and even a pothole or two (Exercising maturity and challenges along the way)
- Committed to fit! (Exercising your BCP is a journey in maturity)

The 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study, conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM, recently revealed that the costs associated with a data breach are rising. That, coupled with the increased prevalence and sophistication of attacks, might make you think there’s a cloudy forecast for data security.
There is a silver lining, however, for organizations that want to limit the cost of these incidents; the study also showed that involving business continuity specialists in your security planning and having a continuity plan for your business can:
- Lower the probability that you will experience a data breach
- Reduce the follow-on impact of a data breach, should one occur
- Help cut data breach costs by an average of $9 per compromised record, from $145 to $136
Join this webcast to hear Paige Poore talk more about why a resiliency plan’s maturity, reach, and role in security planning are key factors in reducing the cost of a data breach and will share her insights based on case studies and experience working with organizations to integrate resiliency into their security planning.

Kathleen and Rob will discuss the benefits of injecting chaos / reality into various kinds of BC/DR exercises. Special attention will be paid to the development and and delivery of complex table-top exercises. They will also talk about how tabletop elements can enhance more traditional DR exercises by injecting realism into what are often extremely artificial events. Tabletop exercises are extremely useful for three reasons:

- They exercise areas of disaster management not often covered in DR and BC testing.
- They exercise those teams that are not often rehearsed together in realistic scenarios.
- They teach loosely formed emergency teams how to work together efficiently and effectively under stressful emergency conditions.

The benefits delivered to BCM programs through the use of tabletop exercises are extraordinary, but many practitioners do not yet have the necessary skills to design and execute them. This webinar will give the audience concrete tactics and techniques, as well as a defined methodology that will lead to tabletop successes.

One of the most important activities to address when developing a technology disaster recovery plan is the plan test. The primary mission of the test is to validate that the data backup/recovery, system failover/recovery and system failback/restoration procedures you have defined work correctly. These activities will help you fine-tune your DR plans more precisely, and will ensure that your recovery teams know their roles and responsibilities during and after a recovery. This webinar provides guidance on how to plan and execute a successful DR test.

Recognizing the availability of managed services firms that specialize in data backup and disaster recovery, it may make sense for your organization to partner with a firm that offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), especially as it applies to DR plan testing. This webinar provides guidance on key activities to address when planning and executing a DR test in partnership with a DRaaS firm.

Many companies have their data backed up but it’s where it is backed up to that is important, the location of that data and how quickly you can access the data to enable the company to continue trading, which is vital.
Unless you can test these aspects you will not know until it is crunch time if your plan is faulty and by then it may well be too late.
Most importantly we will be looking at how you can test your plan without disruption to your business. We will also be hearing from Nikki Goringe Larkin, who has recently had to put her BCP into action, on the outcome and how important it is to test your BCP.

Today, organisations of all sizes are undergoing a significant IT-driven transformation. IT environments have reached a point where complexity in existing backup and recovery infrastructures is often a vast and unwieldy mix of both physical and virtual servers, along with different hardware and software solutions. While information volumes are rising continually, backup windows shrink and IT must operate around the clock.

All of this creates challenges in the backup environment, making it both difficult and costly to manage backup and recovery holistically. Therefore, IT leadership is increasingly looking for better ways to protect their data. It is not just because existing backup solutions are broken (some are, some are legacy, some are point products, and others just aren’t scaling and/ or performing as their IT environments evolve) – but that’s not all of them. In many cases, IT leadership is just trying to improve what they are doing, often from a return-on-investment (ROI) perspective, not technical features.

In this webcast we address how you can modernise backup and recovery and gain financial advantages that contribute to an improved ROI.

Phoenix has been recovering technology, people and processes for over 25 years. During that time, they've built up a wealth of knowledge and expertise in recovery situations. No-one is better placed in the industry to understand the significance of testing business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

In this session, Chris Coulson reviews feedback from Phoenix Recovery Engineers around the country, highlighting the common causes of invocations and the sometimes unexpected issues arising from rehearsal situations. If ever you needed evidence that an untested plan is worthless, you'll get it here! Experience a rehearsal from the perspective of a Phoenix recovery engineer, who will deliver practical tips to take back to your business and we discuss some compelling services that help both rehearsals and real-life invocations, run smoothly.

Demand on IT disaster recovery functions to be more cost effective and efficient is increasingly pushing companies towards cloud-based solutions. This strategy can offer flexibility, convenience and simplicity, however Disaster Recovery in a virtual world can give rise to a new set of potential problems.

Join Darren Swift from Zerto, as he discusses the benefits of a cloud based disaster recovery strategy and how to avoid some of these issues. He will also explore the benefits of using a technology that is hardware-agnostic, storage-agnositc and hypervisor-agnostic.

You'll also learn:

- The importance of continuous data protection to minimise the impact on the production environment
- How to use advanced KPIs and reporting more effectively
- How you can operate effectively within VMWare, AWS or Hyper-V

This webinar will delve into organizational preparedness, response, recovery, and business continuity considerations for active shooter incidents, including:

-Training and education before an incident occurs, so that individuals are empowered to make choices as to how they will react when confronted with an active shooter incident, as well as how to best coordinate with law enforcement and other pertinent stakeholders on preparedness measures for an active shooter incident.
-The importance of emergency notification, and having the tools and procedures in place so that they work seamlessly in emergencies like active shooter incidents that require immediate attention.
-The crisis management efforts required in the aftermath of an active shooter incident and associated challenges, including public information and outreach, deploying mental health and counseling resources, planning and conducting memorial services, and facilitating the resiliency of the organization and its people.
-Balancing the response and emotional aftermath of an active shooter incident with business continuity priorities and continuing essential functions and critical operations, including the challenges associated with dedicating the multitude of resources required to manage such an incident.

Inflexible, constrained, locked in, dependent are all terms we hear used to talk about the IT solutions being used in today’s datacenters. Datacenters are complex with a variety of physical, virtual, and cloud platforms for both computing and storage. Solutions that promise to make a datacenter more manageable, often lock you in to specific platforms or singular processes.

Join this session with Doug Piper to learn about the top 10 capabilities needed to ensure that you are able to freely move your workloads to run on the best platform, and protect them wherever they are running.

Robert Clark MBCI will use case studies from his new book “Validating Your Business Continuity Plan” to consider the arguments for and against running unannounced live exercises. The studies will be based upon his own first-hand experience along with that of business continuity colleagues that he has worked with over the years. The live unannounced test scenarios will include:

- Testing for a 9/11 type scenario 16 years before the event
- Evacuating staff from their normal place of work, closing the building down for three days
- ICT Disaster Recoveries with a 30 minutes’ notice
- How a Christmas four day cruise sank a live test before it had even started

The European Union’s proposed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has left even the most informed confused.
Attend Mike Smart’s panel session to hear from Sian John, Symantec’s Chief Strategist and Tamzin Matthew, Symantec’s Director of Legal introduce this new legislation.
This webinar will cover 3 topics of discussion; Scope of the new regulation, roles and responsibilities of those involved in data privacy and how implementing ‘Privacy by Design’ will minimize the impact of the GDPR.

IT has always been important as the back office, “nervous system” of the business, but now it is front of house, often defining the organisation to its customers. Furthermore, IT is changing rapidly to meet the flexibility, any place, any time and information demands of businesses today. Maintaining the resilience of cloud, mobile, social media, and “big data” based IT services is paramount for the organisation's reputation. But how do we assure this when the complexity and interconnectedness of IT services is increasing? - yet scheduled time to enhance resilience is diminishing.
Noel and Tony will explore these issues and the ways in which organisations are addressing them based on their experience with working with many of the world's most successful companies.

This session will focus on the common risks and threats across the financial services sector that drive clients to invest in designing and delivering simulation exercises to help them build and maintain readiness capabilities. Using a range of case studies, we will explore the benefits and challenges of running exercises in the sector, including some of the drivers and approaches to obtaining senior stakeholder buy-in (budget and time). Participants will learn about some of the key trends and learnings identified across the sector, in particular what best practices they can leverage for their own sector/ industry/ company, as well as what we anticipate the ‘big ticket’ scenarios will be this year.